Review of Little Caesar (1931) by Matt P — 05 Oct 2010

I understand some critics hail this as a great gangster classic ahead of it's time or something along those lines. For me it just wasn't. I normally like classic gangster movies and understand how the acting can be a little flat, or some parts slow, but most of the time I'm proven wrong. This did the exact opposite. The movie wasn't long enough for us to get a feel of Edward G. Robinson's character and previous crimes. We see him rob a gas station and that's about it. From there he just monologues(quite blandly) about how he wants to be the number one crime lord in the Prohibition era and how he wants to be somebody. Wants, wants, wants-preach-preach-preach. There just wasn't enough grit for us to understand just how far this "tough" character was willing to go. And when there WAS a killing, it was passionless. No brutality, just a couple of shots.

And along the way of his whole rise to power(which takes place in about 15 minutes) we have this snotty lawman following him-who we KNOW is going to kill him. We KNOW Robinson is going to die from a mile away, so where you'd expect the movie to do it creatively to where we might feel bad for this guy-it does the complete opposite and kills him off like any other gangster movie would. Now I know, I know. It's an early gangster picture so I shouldn't butcher it but the way I see it is that it just doesn't compare to other ones of that time. It was monotonous. I never thought I'd say it, but there needed to be more fireworks and killing. There wasn't enough grit or structure, not enough depth or even interesting plot. So if your looking for a movie that's about a bunch of untalented actors acting like gangster-who act like gangsters, I guess this is a good movie to watch. But a better movie to see in terms of Rise to Power and fall back down again is the original Scarface, which was released after this BUT filmed before.